Dukes conducted and compiled interviews with about 90 people, ranging from television executives and agents to actors and crew that worked on the short-lived series. Co-creator Mark Frost gives significant contributions as do Angelo Badalamenti and several of the series’ directors. David Lynch, notoriously silent about his own work, is not to be found in Reflections. This is not surprising, but his absence is felt.

Fans of the show will be quickly swept up into the germinal stages of the project. It’s exhilarating to read about the hundreds of tiny pieces that had to fall into place for Twin Peaks to air on ABC. From the scripting stages, enthusiasm for the project was fiercely contagious, and just about everyone involved seems to have understood they were part of something monumental.

This book may give newcomers a sense of the cultural impact the show had in its time, and a better understanding of how that impact has spread out across television to this day. But I recommend some familiarity with the show and its players; putting faces to the names on the page brings out the colour and significance of many of these interviews.

Unfortunately, the demise of Twin Peaks wasn’t pretty, and Reflections gives a thorough account of the attendant frustrations and disappointment. As optimistic as everyone was in season one, political pressures, creative troubles and declining ratings left many of the players cynical about Twin Peaks. The hopefulness felt in the book’s opening chapters slowly gives way to the harsh realities of network television, and we as readers are along for the ride.

Reflections offers great breadth of opinion about the television series, but aside from a few disparaging remarks, it almost completely ignores the prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. While this movie is admittedly not everyone’s cup of tea, Fire Walk With Me is in my opinion the keystone of the series, and provides a crucial (and horrifying and beautiful) endnote to the creative efforts behind Twin Peaks. Although Frost was not involved in the movie, nor Lynch in the book, there are more than enough voices to cover the topic, and Reflections suffers for the omission.

Otherwise, Dukes has done a beautiful job of curating the material. He allows the interviewees to tell their story, giving his readers a backstage pass to one of the most important television events of the 20th century. Reflections is also a beautifully produced book, with gorgeous cover art and exclusive (B&W) photos on nice paper. It makes a perfect addition to the bookshelf of any Twin Peaks fan.

The phrase “ahead of his time” seems like a bit of a backhanded compliment. It’s like an apology for why an artist does not have popular appeal despite being head and shoulders above his competition. Like the artist has too much vision. So much that most people don’t get it.

It’s been 8 years since his last film, but David Lynch‘s popularity seems bigger than ever. 2014 sees the Blu-ray release of Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery, which includes the pilot, 29 episodes, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and an infamous 90-minutes-worth of deleted from FWWM.

Twin Peaks, labeled “ahead of its time” in 1990, has shaped television and film culture for twenty-five years and it is widely regarded as a must-see television classic. And it’s nice to see such enthusiasm around this release in social media. The Blu-ray release is apparently a big enough deal to warrant live events, like the August 30th TIFF Bell Lightbox screening of FWWM with stars Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise and Sherilyn Fenn (Fenn didn’t make the final cut of the movie, but remains one of the most alluring women in television history).

So I guess Lynch was really ahead of his time with Eraserhead (1977), which is set for a sickeningly overdue Blu-ray release from Criterion this September. The disc boasts 4K resolution, which will make it far and away the best picture available shy of a film print. Incidentally, I once saw a 35mm screening in LA, but the picture was misaligned, some very crucial framing botched, and some of the special effects magic was ruined by the mistake. The audience was pissed. I was, anyway.

Might audiences be finally catching up with Lynch? His last film wasn’t even a film, proper, but a DV experiment in complexly layered identities. But despite its dark, baffling structure, 3-hour length and deeply idiosyncratic symbolism, Inland Empire wasn’t reviled by critics nearly as much as I expected.

What a great coincidence it would be if Lynch came out of his self-imposed retirement from film. We know he would have an audience. It’s a niche audience, sure, but many will go see anything he puts out. However, Lynch’s films have a tendency to be savagely unexpected and rarely cater to anything resembling a popular market. He obviously only makes films when he feels inspired to do so. But seriously Mr. Lynch, get on that.

Early in university I had a pretty nasty bout of insomnia. After a few weeks I really started to notice the bizarre mood swings that result from no sleep. In the course of one hour I could laugh hysterically at the most unfunny things, then almost weep because my coffee was cold. At night I couldn’t shut off my thoughts, and I couldn’t ignore them enough to fall asleep. My brain jumped from topic to topic without any focus, like flicking through channels on the television. By morning, after five or six hours of this without any break, I’d get up and go to school. It wasn’t long before my life felt like a hallucination. It wasn’t as awesome as it sounds.

I had a good friend who wasn’t sleeping either, and we both compounded the issue by overdrinking coffee. We decided to watch all of Twin Peaks consecutively. This includes a 1.5-hour pilot episode, twenty-nine episodes and the feature film that is the crown jewel of the experience, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. It took us about thirty-five hours. Even though sleep wasn’t a real option for either of us, the quality of consciousness during and after a marathon like that is particularly strange. We must have drank three pots of coffee, eaten two pies (one cherry, one apple), and snacked on junk food between pies, so by the time we were finished our brain chemistry was in shambles.

We finished around three or four in the morning and I walked the short distance home to clear my head. But I had been about a week without a night of sleep and had just been on the multidimensional roller coaster ride of Twin Peaks, plus I was full of caffeine and sugar, so my head was anything but clear. The walk home was like wading through neon porridge.

I noticed a bright, warm glow coming from down my street. Closer inspection revealed that the front porch of my house was blazing with fire, flames about five feet tall. I ran up the porch, reached over the fire to ring the doorbell hoping to wake someone up. I tried to stamp out the flames before they caught the awning on fire.

It was a big, blocky, wooden planter in the shape of a swan that burned. The thing used to hold plants. The thing was put together with nails.

My foot came right down on a nail that drove through the sole of my shoe into the ball of my foot. When I lifted my foot there was a smoldering piece of wood attached to it. I backed down the porch on one foot, hands on the railings, as my mom opened the front door and realized what was going on. She got water while I pulled off my shoe, prying the nail out of my foot at a painful angle.

A pitcher of water put out the blackened swan. The fire was under control.

Inside I pulled off my sock and was surprised to find no blood. The nail had been hot enough to cauterize the opening so my foot was swelling up with blood. With an old pair of fingernail scissors I punctured the skin and blood shot out with such a force that it painted a thin red line on the far wall, like a big squirt from a ketchup bottle. I laughed my ass off.

An hour later I was in a deep sleep.

“Is this real Ben? Or is it some strange and twisted dream?” - Jerry Horne